I’m not going to get all political, but to sum things up, I feel that government programs are wonderful when they are helping people who have come across hard times and need some assistance getting back up on their feet. However, I feel that too many people depend on them heavily as a way of life, not as assistance. Many times these people are also the ones buying soda and chips and complaining that it’s too expensive to eat healthy foods.

That’s right poors – Brittany is watching all of you, and knows you buy soda and chips instead of loganic produce and free trade brown rice! Wait, wait – why are you all so appalled by her little experiment? She totally understands it’s not cheap to buy healthy food. Seriously you guys are just taking her post the wrong way! All she meant was, she likes a “good challenge”:

[B]asically it was said that is was too difficult to eat healthy foods for every meal with the amount of money one receives through the EBT program. BAM. Consider my interest piqued. I love a good challenge. I decided that I could do it. I could feed David, Hailey and me a healthy diet for a week on only the amount of money allocated to a family of 3 via EBT.

You know what folks, if you want to lower your grocery budgets and eat on the cheap that’s fine. Commendable, even. But I really wish bloggers would stop trying to prove that all those folks on EBT sit around eating junk food and drinking 40′s, and that they all just choose to be unhealthy.

Sorry but if you are an upper middle class white lady in the suburbs of North Carolina, your attitude of ‘if I can do it, so can they’ is just beyond snotty. The inner city poor do not have a nice SUV to pack up all their cheap fresh veggies from Costco before preparing them in their nice little kitchen. Please stop acting like ‘well they should just buy vegetables and lean meats and whole grains!’ is the final answer for what is going on nutritionally with those using government assistance, and get back to stressing about the farmer’s market being out of kale.

This one is really too much. I’ve never really liked Brittany but I couldn’t really put my finger on why…I guess I generally don’t like people who are omgperfect and perky all the time, which she is. But this is really just unbelievable. Somehow, and I don’t know how, I am still surprised every single GODDAMN DAY how ignorant people are of the world around them. If she just limited it to a budget challenge…fine, but she had to go and discuss EBT and be 100% uninformed, and that is what gives me the rages.

George Orwell wrote about this in 1936: “And the peculiar evil is this, that the less
money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A
millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an
unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of
the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say
when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to
eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth
of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and
we’ll all have a nice cup of tea!”

I was on food stamps for two years. Yes, I did sometimes buy soda and chips. You know why? Because I wanted to live like a normal person and have pretentious bitches like this lady to get the fuck out of my kitchen.

And, listen, just as rich people are FREE to make their decision on what to eat, so are poor people. The rich get handsome tax benefits and corporate subsidies and the poor (and OFTEN WORKING POOR) get food stamps.

I was College Poor and lived on less than $10 a week. (I made bean soup with dried beans, ham hocks and wilted vegetables and ate it every week, every meal.)

I don’t live like that any more, because I’m not poor any more. People who actually are on EBT or SNAP or whatever it’s called this week don’t want to eat like that but they do it because they have to. Once they don’t have to, they don’t. So I don’t understand why bloggers do it. Just to have something new to blog about?

There’s a blogger I read once or twice who was doing a “food stamp challenge” last year and she was all atwitter because her husband wanted a Clif bar at work and Clif bars didn’t fit into her fake food budget, so she asked her readers for ideas. Her braindead readers came up with homemade granola bars, etc. Finally I commented “You say your husband works hard all day and you’re going to deny him a Clif bar as a snack at work because of some stupid challenge you’ve set yourself? If I were your husband I’ll tell you to get lost.”

When will these overprivledged first worlders realize that it isn’t just eating healthy on the EBT allotment, it’s eating healthy on the EBT allotment while dealing with lifestyle challenges (food deserts, long hours at work, multiple jobs, etc.). Give up your car, move 5 miles away from the nearest grocery store, work 15 hour days, and THEN get back to me.

Shit wits like her don’t know that being a stay at home person with a car immediately makes this “challenge” a fucking insult.

OMG I’M ON FOOD STAMPS BECAUSE I WANT TO! I WANT TO WORK 2 JOBS AND HOPE MY KIDS ARE HOME WHEN I GET BACK FROM WORKING 12 HOURS AND HOPE I DON’T MISS MY SECOND BUS TRANSFER TO GET HOME. WAIT, I FORGOT TO BUY THE CHEAP ARUGULA AT THE FARMERS MARKET, DAMN. I SHOULD HEAD BACK.

I don’t know why, but her smiling Grinch derpface next to that load of fuckwittage makes this even more gag-inducing for me. Seriously, no perspective. Not that I am some expert in this area, but I know enough to know not to open my damn mouth about it

Seriously. We easily eat healthily on about 400 a month (family of three) but we live in the heartland, in a state with no sales tax on groceries, with a cheap farmer’s market and a co op that sells many organic and local foods for the same price as conventional produce in some places. I also know a lot about nutrition, having had the luxury to learn about it in my spare time. I would never dare to assume that anyone not in similar circumstances to me could eat the way we do.

I worked as a cashier and more often than not, you could spot those with EBT (or “ebit”, which is apparently the way to make it sound cool or like debit), not because of the way they looked, or the clothes they had on but because of what was on the conveyor belt. Once I even had a woman with Food Stamps say to her friend who was in line behind her (with 2 gallons of ice cream) “Oh, don’t pay for those, I got food stamps!” So not only was the assistance going towards junk food, it was going towards someone else’s junk food!
IMO, Food Stamps should be regulated the same way that WIC is (only certain foods, sizes, ingredients, etc allowed to be purchased on the taxpayer’s funds).

Thanks for that link. That post is full of awesome and I’m going to use it whenever people start blathering about “People on food stamps use them to buy filet mignon and truffles! They should be required to purchase only brown rice and kidney beans!”

So what you’re saying is that people on foodstamps only eat foods that are purchased with their Foodstamps? Food stamps don’t pay for Pizza or subs, does that mean people with food stamps never get to eat pizza or subs? No. My point is that there should be more regulations on what can be purchased with food stamps. Right now the only thing not allowed is prepared foods and alcohol.

And as far as I knew, food stamps are meant for those in need to feed themselves and their family, not to feed their friends ice cream.

Are you aware of the huge amount of money that food stamps put into the system? Food stamps are probably responsible for your cashier job. And if you didn’t have that job lady, you’d possibly be on food stamps. Wanting to eat ice cream to ease your unemployed depression.

Also I doubt that the paltry taxes you pay on paltry cashier wages are keeping the whole welfare system afloat. But thanks for your input.

Pay a little attention before you spout off, I said I workED as a cashier, which means I used to hold that job and no longer do.
And when I workED as a cashier, I made minimum wage but forgot to pop out a bunch of kids and therefore didn’t qualify (and never have) for any assistance -medical included.

Wow, good call. After a quick search, I see that’s happening in AZ, CA and MI -good ol’ Michigan where a woman won the lottery yet was still receiving food stamps and officials were none-the-wiser until she was interviewed about it on the news. We’re really headed in the right direction eh?http://news.yahoo.com/food-stamps-fast-food-restaurants-183900927.html

Back in the 60s, there was a ethnographic study on the financial relationships of inner city residents–basically there was a lot of sharing of resources that went on unreported to the welfare authorities, because, hey, that’s what gets your benefits cut.

I have no problem with someone treating others to ice cream with their EBT, because they are creating a social relationship that means they’ll get some extra diapers or toilet paper from a friend when they have no cash to buy it themselves.

This is ridiculous. Who would make the decision on what is acceptable and what is not? The government officials who think that pizza is a vegetable? The voters? You? What people choose to put into their own bodies is their own business as far as I am concerned.

I am going to be on food stamps in a few weeks. I pack lunch for my hard-working husband everyday that he has work because that’s the most frugal way to go about it. I buy a big bag of chips and give him a zip-lock bag full with every lunch. I should somehow be judged for this? I shouldn’t be allowed to give this great guy some chips with his lunch because the government decides what is best for MY family to eat? I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any regulations on it, but the assumption that MOST people on food stamps buy junk is simply incorrect. Extra regulations should not be created due to a falsehood.

Also, this has been said, but it bears repeating! Not everyone on food stamps has access to a kitchen to cook stuff. A lot of convenience foods may be less healthy, but you can open and eat with little fuss.

Also, fuck, were I living in poverty, I probably could use a treat sometime– you know, like we humans all do. Shit, I need a lot of cookies to get through the week and I have a safe, stable living situation and all.

Word. There’s also the fact that if you can’t buy perishables, you have to buy what you can eat or consume quickly. Calorie-dense items or frozen meals that fill the stomach are the smarter move. Lentils?! FUCK THAT.

If anyone deserves to eat ice cream or buy it for others, it’s someone living below the poverty line, someone whose life probably sucks enough already. If my taxpayer dollars are going toward a poor person’s ice cream, I don’t give a shit. My income (a grad-student stipend, but still) doesn’t give me the right to tell other people what to eat. It just doesn’t. Yes, people in general would be healthier if they ate better food, but you can’t actually argue that ice cream should be reserved for the middle and upper classes. Come on.

Why is this poster getting reamed for sharing her observation? Based on my totally nonscientific, anecdotal evidence, I also notice patterns and am pretty good at guessing who is going to pull out a food stamp card at Whole Foods. It’s usually the person who buys the de-stemmed grapes and copious frozen foods.

And I’m a staunch liberal, supporter of social programs and I believe if you have food stamps, go buy what you want. It’s no skin off my teeth if you don’t want to eat cabbage.

On the other hand, let’s not pretend like all poor people on welfare are subsisting on Cheetos while living in the ghetto. A former roommate of mine got knocked up out of wedlock unexpectedly, lives for free in Section-8 housing in a nice-ish neighborhood in Southern California, had/has her medical and her child’s medical care paid for by the government, had her entire college education paid, stays at home doing nothing while her child goes to a private Montessori daycare. And no doubt, she’s buying destemmed grapes at Whole Foods with food stamps.

And guess what, this is America. That’s okay. But seriously, forget the idea that poor people are all people like my own parents were — busting their asses with multiple jobs and trying to pull themselves out of poverty.

Because pulling yourself out of poverty is an available option these days, what with structural inequities remaining exactly as they were ~50 years ago and wealth not polarizing… OH HEY WAIT.

You know one person; I know another. I was a cashier at a big-box, Walmart-ish grocery store. Shall we play anecdata roulette? Obviously, we can hold everything constant, since demographics and access routes near your Whole Foods would have anything to do with your clientele and their choices.

Plenty of people pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Plenty don’t. People aren’t all the same, and that’s okay. But the point is: welfare in this country is generous. Life in this country is generous. This is a country where if you don’t want to or physically cannot work, the government will support you. If you have no house, Section-8 will house you. If you want to educate your children, public schools will do it at no cost. If you can’t feed your children, WIC will help you. If you have no health insurance and also no job, Medicaid and MediCal will pay for you.

I’m not pointing these things out because I think they all need to go away. I’m not Rush Limbaugh. But I’ve also lived in a third world country, watched my parents struggle, and I know that on a global scale poor people in American are comparatively well off.

The only sad exception is the mentally ill — we woefully mistreat the mentally ill in this country, hence why they so frequently end up homeless.

This just isn’t true. If you are on welfare you get $200 and change for your housing, so you’re basically guaranteed to end up homeless. You think you automatically get Section 8 housing? No you end up in the shelter system for god knows how long.

Neither does the government support the sick, they make disability as difficult as possible to claim, and even if you’re successful you’re looking at 18 mths of waiting AT LEAST.

Hundreds of people fall through the cracks every day, the American welfare system is not one that supports, it’s not designed to.

In NYS, where I am a social worker, you can only get Section 8 if you are in the witness protection program or a victim of DV. Applications have been declined from all other applicants, per policy, since 2004.

I’m not really going to argue because I agree that anecdotal evidence does not a real argument make. But I’ve seen REAL poverty – not the narrow American definition in which a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables is the most harrowing “food desert” ever — and it doesn’t look anything like what I’ve seen in America.

People here, they have it good. I find it amazing that it’s unacceptable to think with any nuance about poverty, welfare, etc. It’s not black and white and it’s hard to argue with people who see it that way.

Yeah, I looked into Section 8 Housing for someone here in TX, & it’s definitely a ‘maybe’ situation based on available funds in your county & meeting criteria & being wait-listed & yada yada red tape out the kazoo …

Amazingly, the only people who think gov’t assistance is a gravy train are those who’ve never navigated the system.

Ah, sorry, Donkadelphia… got ya. I have a close relative who is mentally ill and I’m deathly afraid she’ll end up on the streets since according to the law, you “have the right to be crazy” (as has been told to me by many police officers, psychiatrists, etc) as long as you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else.

I have a very brilliant friend who is (to those of us who know her well) mentally unstable but very functional when sticking to her meds … she’s had her share of down-on-your-luck scenarios in this suck-ass job mkt (READ: unemployed = uninsured = unmedicated) & man, oh man, it’s beyond scary when she is left to her own devices.

Yeah, the under-funding of mental health benefits in the USA is a crying shame, no two ways about it.

Have you been to Appalachia at all??? Seriously, hang out in certain parts of West Virginia and Kentucky for a few days, get someone to show you around, and then tell me that we don’t have REAL poverty in this country.
And it’s worse than China and India because the USA is supposed to be better than that! We aren’t supposed to have people who live in rotted out shells of trailers with no running anything and then are expected to drive 30 miles to town for work and school. You are like Rush Limbaugh if you are spouting off crap like that.

And the Native Americans! Have you ever read or seen anything about the way a lot of Native Americans have to live?! It’s embarrassing and there is nothing well off about their situation!
I don’t know where you live, but you are very lucky to live in such a nice place with no poverty. I wish others in the US were as lucky. But just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Ugh. Is she talking about food deserts or other issues poor people have with access to fresh produce and other healthy foods? It’s fine if she wants to do a food challenge, but as a middle class woman (this is all an assumption since I don’t read her blog), she probably has her pick of grocery stores, both discount and high end near her.

I don’t know if the “challenge” is really valid. If she has a school age child, that child would probably qualify for school lunch (maybe even breakfast in some school districts). That would be one more expense she doesn’t have to factor in to that $400/month.

If only they just had Kindles they could get healthy recipes and then go shopping for healthy ingredients.
If she’s so passionate about this challenge she should find a family on food stamps and do a house swap, see how far her budget goes when she has limited resources for shopping.
I’m actually surprised there hasn’t been a reality show like that yet.

Doubt you’ll see this but Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days is basically doing stuff just like that. The first episode, he and his family live on the poverty line (no insurance etc). I cried the whole way through; they ended up needing the emergency room twice that week. Harrowing.

“I maybe should have done a better job of emphasizing the fact that I do think food assistance programs are wonderful for people that need them. I hate that here are some that abuse the system and give others that are truly deserving of it a bad name. I commend your relatives for making ends meet in such a tough situation. I would love for the people abusing the systems to be filtered out so that more funds and other resources could be allocated to those that are truly in need. Thanks for your comments!”

UGH. Chick, people like YOU are the ones giving the system a bad name. YOU are the one bitching about what people buy on EBT, shooting the judgmental side-eye at their chips and soda. It’s not that there are really notable numbers of people committing welfare fraud, it’s that YOU judge everyone and think they are abusing it.

I hate these people. The next time someone says dumb shit like that to me I’m going to say we should get rid of half the handicapped parking spaces out there, and also employ someone to run up to people who park in those spaces and kick them in the knees, just to make sure they’re handicapped enough.

But WHERE are all these mythical people abusing the system? I hear about them but in the 5 years I used assistance to buy my food, I never met them. I never met the junk food buying, Filet Mignon eating poor who are “wasting taxpayer money”. I met a whole lot of single moms buying milk and animal crackers, a whole bunch of low income families getting some bunches of carrots and peanut butter, and me and my lazy ass ex husband buying our tortillas. Wash, rinse, repeat. Seriously, not once did I encounter someone buying something I found offensive while they were obviously using assistance funds to shop.

Everyone seems to have a story about that one ghetto welfare queen they saw buying steak with her EBT whilst texting on her iPhone and wearing $200 worth of weave. Because that’s more interesting than the chick buying spaghetti sauce and corn flakes and not flaunting her card or telling everyone she knows that she gets food stamps. When people start talking in public about how much they hate peop,e on welfare, I cringe, because you just really never know who is quietly getting by on public assistance.

I have never seen people abusing the system by buying things that are “offensive” or whatever. But virtually everyone that I work with (clients, not co-workers) receives some kind of government assistance and what I do see ALL the time is people claiming children that either (a) aren’t part of their household or (b) are no longer legally considered children (like some claim kids that are 25+). This happens most often with fathers who do not support their children in any way – the kids don’t live with them and they don’t pay support – but they claim the kids for the food stamps.

I don’t really know I feel about this. On the one hand, I don’t like seeing the system being abused, but on the other hand, most of these men don’t have a lot of opportunities and never have – not to mention there are often other factors like drug addiction and mental illness at play. So yeah, abuse does happen… but I’m not really interested in listening to this privileged bitch’s outrage over it.